AVCS students pen digital book

Evan Maicus, a current AVCS student along with his graduate cousin, Jeremy Wood, co-authored “The 15th Company,” which is currently being sold as a digital work on Amazon for Kindle.

A six year labor has turned into the first published work for a pair of AuSable Valley High School students.

Evan Maicus, a current AVCS student along with his graduate cousin, Jeremy Wood, co-authored “The 15th Company,” which is currently being sold as a digital work on Amazon for Kindle.

“Right around the end of putting everything together is when we started to think about publishing the book digitally,” Maicus said. “It can cost a lot of money to get a book published, and then you are going to barely break even or have to ask a ridiculous amount for the book.”

Maicus said the duo receives 70-percent of the revenue from the book, which currently sells on Amazon.com for $9.98.

Maicus also said they will soon have printed editions of the book through Amazon.

“It is a print-on-demand system, so we are going to start with 15 or 20 books and see how they sell,” he said.

Maicus recently shared his experience writing a book with Wood with members of the 11th grade honors class at AVCS.

Wood said one of the keys has been getting word out about the work.

“We have a lot of publicizing to do,” he said. “The first hurdle is going to be getting the word out.”

“The Fifteenth Company,” is a fantasy novel about two young men who live in the fictional country of Dallaran, being forced into a sudden, massive conflict after being invaded.

“There is a lot of our experiences that are in the book,” Maicus said. “We took from the geography of the area, as well.”

Maicus said the duo first thought of putting the book together in 2006, taking until January of 2011 to write a draft.

“We were inspired by other books that were written by younger people,” Maicus said. “We thought, why can’t we do the same thing.”

It took another year to finalize the book before creating the digital edition.

“We have had three reviews on the Amazon website, and they have all been positive,” Maicus said. “That feels good because usually people who like something don’t take time to write comments - it’s usually only bad things.”

Maicus said that this book is just the opening chapter.

“We want to make this a series,” he said. “Hopefully, it will not take six years to get a second book out.”